Archive For The “Software” Category
Back in late 2008 and early 2009, I had a few projects underway. One was investigating the impact of high temperatures on the longevity and fault rates in servers. We know what it costs to keep a data center cool, but what I wanted to know is what it would cost if we didn’t keep…
It’s hard to believe that a relational database in personal use at home will ever have much of a load when it comes to transaction processing but our home RDBMS is surprisingly busy, with more than a hundred database interactions per second. It’s still not even within an order of magnitude as busy as many…
If you work in the database world, you already know Phil Bernstein. He’s the author of Principles of Transaction Processing and has a long track record as a successful and prolific database researcher. Past readers of this blog may remember Phil’s guest blog posting on Google Megastore. Over the past few years, Phil has been…
While at Microsoft I hosted a weekly talk series called the Enterprise Computing Series (ECS) where I mostly scheduled technical talks on server and high-scale service topics. I said “mostly” because the series occasionally roamed as far afield as having an ex-member of the Ferrari Formula 1 team present. Client-side topics are also occasionally on…
From the Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing Perspectives post: The networking equipment world looks just like mainframe computing ecosystem did 40 years ago. A small number of players produce vertically integrated solutions where the ASICs (the central processing unit responsible for high speed data packet switching), the hardware design, the hardware manufacture, and the entire…
I got a chance to chat with Eric Baldeschwieler while he was visiting Seattle a couple of weeks back and catch up on what’s happening in the Hadoop world at Yahoo and beyond. Eric recently started Hortonworks whose tag line is “architecting the future of big data.” I’ve known Eric for years when he led…
It’s a clear sign that the Cloud Computing market is growing fast and the number of cloud providers is expanding quickly when startups begin to target cloud providers as their primary market. It’s not unusual for enterprise software companies to target cloud providers as well as their conventional enterprise customers but I’m now starting to…
Earlier this week, I was in Athens Greece attending annual conference of the ACM Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data. SIGMOD is one of the top two database events held each year attracting academic researchers and leading practitioners from industry. I kicked off the conference with the Plenary keynote. In this talk I…
Guido van Rossum was at Amazon a week back doing a talk. Guido presented 21 Years of Python: From Pet Project to Programming Language of the Year. The slides are linked below and my rough notes follow: · Significant Python influencers: o Algol 60, Pascal, C o ABC o Modula0-2+ and 3 o Lisp and…
Ben Black always has interesting things on the go. He’s now down in San Francisco working on his startup Fastip which he describes as “an incredible platform for operating, exploring, and optimizing data networks.” A couple of days ago Deepak Singh sent me to a recent presentation of Ben’s I found interesting: Challenges and Trade-offs…
Last week, Sudipta Sengupta of Microsoft Research dropped by the Amazon Lake Union campus to give a talk on the flash memory work that he and the team at Microsoft Research have been doing over the past year. Its super interesting work. You may recall Sudipta as one of the co-authors on the VL2 Paper…
If you have experience in database core engine development either professionally, on open source, or at university send me your resume. When I joined the DB world 20 years ago, the industry was young and the improvements were coming ridiculously fast. In a single release we improved DB2 TPC-A performance by a factor of 10x….
Earlier this week Clustrix announced a MySQL compatible, scalable database appliance that caught my interest. Key features supported by Clustrix: · MySQL protocol emulation (MySQL protocol supported so MySQL apps written to the MySQL client libraries just work) · Hardware appliance delivery package in a 1U package including both NVRAM and disk · Infiniband interconnect…
In this month’s Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, a rematch of the MapReduce debate was staged. In the original debate, Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker, both giants of the database community, complained that: 1. MapReduce is a step backwards in database access 2. MapReduce is a poor implementation 3. MapReduce is not novel…
HPTS has always been one of my favorite workshops over the years. Margo Seltzer was the program chair this year and she and the program committee brought together one of the best programs ever. Earlier I posted my notes from Andy Bectolsheim’s session Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 and his slides Technologies for Data Intensive…
Just about exactly one year ago, I posted a summary and the slides from an excellent Butler Lampson talk: The Uses of Computers: What’s Past is Merely Prologue. Its time for another installment. Butler was at SOSP 2009 a few weeks back and Marvin Theimer caught up with him for a wide ranging discussion on…